Here is
one of the more astonishing facts of an already fairly astonishing war: The
tunnels that Hamas has dug under Gaza’s border with Israel – tunnels designed
not for commerce, but for kidnapping – reportedly contain tranquilizers and
handcuffs, seemingly meant to be used by Hamas terrorists to gain physical
control over Israelis they’ve seized.

I
sometimes find it tiring to listen to Israeli spokesmen ask the same question
over and over again: What would you want your leaders to do if your country’s
enemies were firing rockets at your home?

The
answer these spokesmen seek doesn’t come entirely easily these days. This is in
part because much of the world suffers from a kind of Hamas-specific amnesia,
in which the group’s past deeds (hundreds of murdered Israelis) and extreme
goals are forgotten as soon as they are learned. But it’s also in part because
the success of the Iron Dome anti-rocket system complicates the whole subject a
bit.

The
Iron Dome batteries could have provided Israeli policy makers with at least one
answer that was short of immediate aerial retaliation, or eventual ground
invasion. Israel might have been smarter, at the outset of the war, to absorb
some of these initial attacks (assuming, of course, that it had continued good
luck in interception). This would have ultimately made its cause slightly
easier to explain to the world.

A
delayed, or minimalist, response to the rocket attacks would have also denied
Hamas an obvious battlefield victory: Hamas’s morally perverted but tactically
clever goal is to maximize Palestinian civilian casualties. Its rockets are bait.
And Israel has become expert at taking the bait.

But
there is no Iron Dome for tunnels. The tunnels give me real pause. It’s hard
enough to imagine a situation in which your neighbors are quite intentionally
trying to blow up your house and kill your children with rockets. But Hamas’s
well-developed kidnapping strategy represents a whole other category of
depravity. The handcuffs and tranquilizers are mere baroque, Pulp Fictionish
details. The core depravity of Hamas is its longstanding policy of treating
every Jew as a target for elimination.

So I
would ask this question: What would you want your government to do if your
enemy was digging tunnels under your village, in order to pop out at night to
kill or kidnap you? Could you imagine taking the risk that members of your
family might be seized, dragged underground, handcuffed and tranquilized, and
then held in the dark, perhaps for years, perhaps never to come home? Hamas
terrorists have recently emerged from these tunnels inside Israel multiple times.
This is not a theoretical threat.

An
honest person would answer this question the following way: I would prefer that
my government do whatever it must do to make sure that terrorists are not
constructing tunnels under my house in order to kidnap me or members of my
family.

Israel
is a disputatious, fragmented, politically discordant place. But the country
has been remarkably unified these past two weeks, in large part because
Israelis – even those who find their government’s West Bank settlement project
destructive and self-defeating, and who find their prime minister reactionary
and unfeeling – understand the tactical and strategic goals of Hamas. The
tactical goals are to terrorize Israelis and bring about the international
delegitimization of Israel. The strategic goal – the theological goal, in fact –
is to bring about the end of their country.

The
center-left columnist Ari Shavit seemed to speak for most Israelis when he
wrote:

What
are we fighting for? Our home. The Jewish people was a people without a home,
who managed the impossible, and created a home for itself. The State of Israel
is a miracle. We must not give up this miracle. We must not endanger it, and we
must not take its existence for granted. When dark forces try to annihilate it,
we must defend it. When hypocritical, self-righteous forces try to weaken it,
we must make it stronger. We are surrounded by a new threat of Muslim Arab
chaos. Enemies seeking our blood amass at our walls.

They
amass under their feet, as well. This is why Israelis appear adamant that any
cease-fire agreement reached between the parties must eradicate the threat of
these kidnapping tunnels, at a minimum. Anything short of this will fail to
bring any stability to the region. Hamas, which is incapable of envisioning
peace and reconciliation in the manner of advocates for a two-state solution,
and which has already rejected multiple calls for cease-fires, is demanding
that Israel and Egypt (which has Gaza’s southern border blockaded as well)
reopen both Gaza’s borders and its ports.

This
would be insanity. For years, Hamas leaders demanded that Israel allow them to
import concrete in order to build homes for Gaza’s poor. We now know where so
much of this concrete went – into the tunnels that run under Israel’s border,
and into bunkers and bomb shelters for Gaza’s ruling elite. (The civilians of
Gaza, the ones exposed to Israel’s bombardments, do not benefit from these
exclusive bomb shelters).

The
regime in Qatar, Hamas’s main friend in the region, is sympathetic to the group’s
demand. No one else seems to be. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is right to
seek a cease-fire, but the price should not be an agreement to allow an
unreformed Hamas to engage in free, uninspected, commerce. Kerry appears to be
pushing for a cease-fire that would allow Israel to continue the hunt for these
tunnels. There is no way Israel would agree to a cease-fire without this right.

This is
the third time that Hamas and Israel have fought since Israel withdrew its
settlers and soldiers from Gaza in 2005 (a moment at which Gaza’s Palestinians
found themselves with the opportunity, ultimately unseized, to build something
other than tunnels and rocket launchers). There will surely be another conflict
unless Hamas is disarmed, or unless President Mahmoud Abbas’s more moderate
Palestinian Authority can somehow be brought back to power in Gaza. This is
highly unlikely, both because the Palestinian Authority is weak and because
Hamas will not willingly negotiate away the weapons that allow it to terrorize
Israelis.

Israel,
then, is faced with three enormous and difficult tasks. It must do a much
better job of minimizing Palestinian casualties as it fights Hamas, because
this is a moral necessity and a strategic imperative. It must also do something
it hasn’t done well at all, which is to create an alternate reality on the West
Bank, one that shows Palestinians a different and brighter sort of future than
the one promised by Hamas. And – and this is its main task at the moment – it
must ensure that its citizens aren’t kidnapped and murdered by a group that
seeks not an equitable two-state solution but the annihilation of their
country.

It’s
the moral equivalence which is so devastating. When Egypt this week proposed
its ceasefirein
Gaza, a BBC presenter asked whether both sides would now conclude that there
was no point carrying on with the war. From the start, restraint has been urged
on both sides — as if more than 1,100 rocket attacks on Israel in three weeks
had the same weight as trying to stop this onslaught once and for all.

Israel
has been bombing Gaza solely to stop Hamas and its associates from trying to
kill Israeli citizens. But for many in the West, the driving necessity is not
to stop Hamas but to stop Israel.

Moral
equivalence morphs instantly into moral bankruptcy. People have looked at the
casualty count — around 200 Palestinians killed at the time of writing, while
only a handful of Israelis have been injured or killed — and decided that this
proves Israel is a monstrous aggressor.

No
concern at all for the Israelis who have only a few seconds to rush to a
shelter when the sirens start to wail, car drivers flinging themselves to the
ground at the side of the road. No concern for the elderly or dis-abled
Israelis who can’t get to a shelter, the hospital patients left helpless while
the rockets slam into the ground nearby.

Just
imagine if the Scots, for example, had for years been firing at England volleys
of rockets that were now putting 40-50 million people within range.
Unimaginable? Of course it is. No country would tolerate it. But that’s the
equivalent situation in which tiny Israel has found itself. Yet it is
simultaneously having to fight another war: against a West determined to
demonise it with accusations of deliberate atrocities, lack of restraint or an
attempt to conquer more land.

To
these people, whatever Israel does to defend itself is bad. Killing Gazans is
bad, warning them to flee so they won’t be killed is bad, the Iron Dome missile
defence system is bad because, while Palestinians are being killed, Israelis
are not. Ah yes, that’s the real outrage, isn’t it? Not enough dead Jews. How
dare they defend themselves so effectively!

And so
the West does Hamas’s dirty work for it. Hamas cannot defeat Israel militarily.
Its strategy is not just to kill Israelis and demoralise the population, but
also to de-legitimise Israel so that the West, too, will work for its
destruction. Hamas’s rockets have failed in the first two objectives — but the
third is a runaway success.

In its
hundreds of tunnels, Hamas has built an underground infrastructure of
industrialised terror the length of Gaza. As a Fatah spokesman blurted out, it
has situated its arsenal among civilians, underneath schools and hospitals and
mosques, for the infernal purpose of using its population as human shields and
human sacrifices.

It has
urged Gazans to make themselves the target of Israeli air strikes. It has
ordered them to ignore the Israeli warnings to evacuate, which are delivered by
leaflet, phone, text and warning shots.

Doesn’t
the Israel-atrocity brigade ever pause to wonder why Hamas has provided no
air-raid shelters for its people, while Israel has constructed a national
shelter system? Gazan civilians are dying in order to maximise their numbers
killed in the war, so that Hamas can incite against Israel in both the Muslim
world and the West.

And it
openly games the PR system. Hamas social media guidelines instruct Gazans not
to post pictures of missiles launched from “residential areas” and always to
add the term “innocent citizen” to any casualty’s name. So the figures it
issues for civilian as opposed to terrorist casualties, re-circulated by the
UN, are worthless.

Israel
is waging this war in accordance with international law, which states that when
houses are used for military purposes they may become legitimate military
targets. But as Ibrahim Kreisheh, the Palestinian delegate to the UN Human
Rights Council, admitted in a remarkable TV interview, while Israel’s killing
of civilians is considered in law merely a mistake, Hamas is committing war
crimes by deliberately targeting Israeli civilians. Indeed, given its use of
Gazan human shields, it is guilty of war crimes twice over.

All
civilian casualties, however, are deeply to be regretted and to be avoided
wherever possible. And so Gaza presents Israel with a hideous dilemma. Either
it inescapably kills a lot of civilians as a by-product of destroying the
infrastructure of mass murder, or it leaves that infrastructure at least partly
in place to spare the civilians. Until now, it has chosen the latter.

It is
also allowing food and fuel into Gaza; its offer of blood supplies was turned
down by the Palestinian Authority. When a Hamas rocket downed a power line
supplying electricity to 70,000 Gazans, workers from the Israel Electric
Company braved Hamas rocket fire to restore power to Gaza — enabling it to fire
more rockets at Israel.

Yet it
is Israel which is said to be “out of control,” guilty of indiscriminate
slaughter and even — as ludicrous as it is obscene — “genocide.”

Those
who demonise Israel in this way should realise just what they are supporting.
Palestinian society, both through Hamas and Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah (whose
military wing has also been firing rockets from Gaza), brainwashes its children
that glory lies in killing Jews. It routinely pumps out Judeophobic incitement
straight from the Nazi playbook.

A few
days ago, Yahya Rabah, a member of the Fatah Leadership Committee in Gaza,
recycled the medieval blood libel when he wrote in Al-Hayat al-Jadida that the Jews offer sacrifices during Passover “made
from the blood of our children.”

Every
western supporter of the Palestinian war against Israel is also tacitly
supporting such anti-Jewish derangement. This psychotic bigotry is the true
driver of that war, as well as the Islamist war against the West. Yet
astoundingly it is never, ever mentioned. The intractable problem of Gaza has
been exacerbated by the meddling incomprehension of a western world that just
doesn’t grasp how Islamist fanatics play by entirely different rules.

The
West insists on moral equivalence between Israel and the Palestinians, as if
the century-old conflict between the Arabs and the Jews were simply a squabble
over the equitable division of land. It is not. It is a war to destroy the
Jewish national homeland by people driven into frenzy by forces immune to
reason.

Israeli
parents are now steeling themselves for the nightmare of their sons in the
Israel Defence Force being deployed in a Gazan land war to stop the rockets.
Some of those boys will be killed. But it will be the Palestinian casualties,
the Hamas war crime, which will be used once again to blame the Jews for their
own destruction.